Highly recommended books from my recent reading. Each deals with reality and our perceptions of it in unexpected ways.
Stories that will stay with me. Some uncanny, magical realist, others political, and a few experimental.
All Fires the Fire
A novel containing zombie movies, an actual walking deadman, and a particularly nasty fingernail. The story looks at how we grieve the departed and those still with us, but who are no longer all there.
The Third Hotel: A Novel
Leonora Carrington was a member of the Surrealists, but wrote beyond that movement. Her stories defy description, but if you enjoy Kafka or Karen Russell, there is something for you.
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
I read this in a single evening. The story of a day laborer in the early twentieth century. An unsentimental look at what for many at the time, was a simple life. Yet such lives are never ordinary and can border the unreal.
Train Dreams: A Novella
Anna Kavan's stories are claustrophobic, surreal, sometimes psychologically terrifying, and often funny.
Machines in the Head: Selected Stories
Kate Atkinson has produced a collection of stories which connect in unexpected ways. She leaves you unsure what anyone means by the “real” world.
Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories
One of my all-time favorite books. Where the story's main character is and why he's there remain a compelling mystery until the very end. And even then, what was real or imagined remains for each reader to decide.
Piranesi
Two young boys and their father grieve - with the help of Crow.
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers: A Novel
This book crept up on me after reading it. I keep thinking about it. It's a darker tale, part myth, part folktale.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness: A Novel
Jones is known mostly as a writer of horror, but these flash length stories are not that. They are strange and feel real.
